


Lay Your Weary Head to Rest

by angeloscastiel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 03:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeloscastiel/pseuds/angeloscastiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel learns that no experience of human emotion is complete without grief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Your Weary Head to Rest

Castiel has known grief as an angel. He has had guilt and shame and loss weigh down on him like heaven on the shoulders of Atlas. He has watched humans for millenia, watched them tear their hair and beat their flesh while he struggled to imagine the depths of pain that would drive someone to that end.

What he could never see or understand was the emptiness.

He is hollow, moving silently through a life devoid of light, and he cannot find it in himself to scream anymore. He thinks of Niobe and her eternal river of tears, and he understands.

Such knowledge of humanity, he thinks bitterly, comes at such high a price.

It is raining, a steady drizzle that shrouds the world in a tangible misery and makes Castiel think, for a fleeting moment, that he still has control over the heavens, for why else would they match his despair – one raindrop for each tear he sheds?

Time has thinned and greyed his hair, but he is still young – far too young to see the years ahead of him as anything more than a burden stretching on, impossibly, towards a conclusion that is suddenly too far away.

Sam has aged and Castiel has not noticed until now, when grief has hardened his features and set them into stone. He tosses salt down into the dirt, his face expressionless, and meets Castiel’s eye as he draws a matchbox from his pocket.

Castiel nods, turning away as Sam strikes the match, and his heart breaks anew at the finality of it.

Dean was always going to have a hunter’s funeral. Even now, after they settled down as much as it was possible to settle down, and hunting became a weekend rather than a full-time job, there has been an unspoken agreement between the three of them. Because they know, now, that there is no coming back. Fate, destiny, heaven and hell have finished their grand plans with the Winchesters.

There was no room for platitudes at the funeral, nobody to give them and nobody to listen. Even after twenty years, the Winchesters have no friends who remain blissfully unaware of the supernatural. They know there are no angels in Heaven, no fluffy clouds or harps or streets paved with gold. They know because Castiel told them, in the days when the pain of his brothers’ fall had ceded and thoughts of Heaven were bearable.

Castiel’s fingers trace the cold, wet granite of the headstone. _Dean Winchester,_ a voice whispers in his head, and Castiel loses himself, momentarily, in the beauty of the name. _Beloved son, brother, husband and father. Lay your weary head to rest._

Castiel does not trust himself to look at the second grave.

It is tiny, he knows, impossibly tiny beside her father’s, but his eyes are trained on the soft dirt now covering Dean as if he can block out one loss by fully acknowledging the other.

They’d named her Charis, and Castiel can still remember Dean’s laugh when he’d first suggested the name, and “Come on, man, Charis? What language is that even from?” but when Castiel explained it means grace and thanksgiving, Dean had smiled and said, “You know what, Cas, I think it’ll grow on me,” and insisted her middle name was to be Samantha.

They’d had seven years. Seven years as a family, just him and Dean and Charis and the rabbit they’d gotten for her sixth birthday, and he can still remember coming home with the damn thing hidden under Dean’s shirt because they’d left the cage at home, and the way Charis’s eyes lit up when she saw it, and how she’d named it Rapunzel after her favourite princess and neither Dean nor Castiel had the heart to tell her it was actually a boy bunny.

He still remembers her first day at school, and Dean crouching down to tell her that if any kid messes with her, she’d be sure to tell him and he’d _sort them out_ , and Castiel’s exasperated “ _Dean,”_ and the little ache in his heart as he watched her trotting off into the building, dwarfed by her new backpack.

Castiel hears the strike of the match behind him and watches it fall. That’s his daughter, his little girl, and a rush of panic grips him as he moves forward, wanting nothing more than to pull her from the flames and clutch her to his chest and hear the shuddering breaths she takes when she’s had a nightmare, but she is gone forever and he is alone.

Someone is kneeling in the mud beside him, her arms wrapping around him, whispering, “I know, hun,” and he breaks down in Jody Mills’s arms and realises that the Greeks were right when they said it is better for man to die than to live.

* * *

 

Castiel has no faith left, knows there is no God anymore and nobody to hear his prayers, but he thanks an unknown deity every night as he passes Charis’s empty bedroom that Dean had died behind the wheel, without seeing his daughter’s lifeless body in the backseat of the mangled Impala.


End file.
